My school committee didn’t bend rules to accommodate another head for what we thought was an ambitious project. Our group of four was just far too many to be assigned to one task. We parted ways; I formed a smaller team that produced a design solution using a reinforced catenary shell. My buddy Bharath formed another, and they went on to create a fantastic tool for designing shallow foundations.

In addition to working on theoretical solution, we also programmed stuff ourselves. On hindsight, I realize we compromised. The stuff we produced in the end lacked finesse, and left much to be desired. In the end, it remained just a solution. We could never really convert them into professional tools we’d have much loved to.

In over twelve years of my professional life, I’ve seen (and continue to see) tools with great potential end-up as poor implementations. People good at both core competencies—theory, and programming are simply few and far in-between.

I often think about my school projects, and how different they would have turned out if we had a multi-discipline team. A lot of design work involves heavy automation. If I was in school today, I’d do things differently:

We’d have a team of four: two civil engineering², and two computer science (CS) students. Each discipline would produce their own project, just married in concept, and challenging enough for both. Both works would be complementary to each other.

Civil team would work on theory, and solution. CS team would apply their innovative skills in developing something ground-breaking in programming that solution. Each team would attend others’ ground work sessions. This would help in more ways than one: We’d learn from each other’s skills, appreciate individual challenges and come-up with out-of-the box solutions. Indirectly, this would also have the potential to go the entrepreneurial way—if the teams decided to.

My time may be up to go back to school and do it again; but not yours. If you’re a student, get your buddies together to think about it. Throw ideas at your professors and see what they think about inter-discipline collaboration.

1. To us at that time c. 1992.
2. This could well be your own core discipline; I am just mentioning Civil since that’s my background.

I’d like to deconstruct this discussion, add my views here and suggest solutions where possible. But before that, let me briefly summarize this debate, for those who didn’t get a chance to view it.

It was about the internet in general and the issues surrounding it—anonymity, blogging, knowledge and ignorance about this technology, Government laxity in capacity and laws, access to pornography and parents’ concerns, cyber-stalking, account cracking, stealing privacy, cyber-dating, freedom of expression; you get the picture.

Representation: I was happy to see two respected bloggers—Shivam Vij and Jai Arjun Singh represent blogging fraternity in India, and I wished they had time to add more to what they had to say. I can imagine how hard it is to summarize, provide rational view on so many issues in such a miniscule of time given to them. There was also Dhruv—another blogger, who said some really good things as well. Shohini Ghosh was perhaps the most eloquent among all, and put the right frame around most issues discussed. I would have loved to quote them all here, but then I don’t have TiVo.

Okay, so let’s go. My take:

Anonymity and blogging: Barkha Dutt was honest enough to confess that this topic doesn’t sit well with her. It’s her opinion, I have nothing to say, of course. In the same breath, I respect anyone choosing anonymity. My simple reasoning—there are more people doing good things under the protection of anonymity than there are bad ones using it for their personal gains and motives.

I actually believe anonymity is a good shield, especially when the odds are against him or her, in terms of the technical knowhow, for example. You can walk away and no harm done—unless you do something really bad, of course.

How should people deal with someone expressing under anonymity?

Well, look at the content and be a judge yourself; all within the framework of respecting other’s opinion. Agree to disagree—if you have to and move on. Don’t rate it if it offends you. By merely raising your dissent, you’re indirectly popularizing whatever you don’t like—unless you want it to improve—and assuming there’s room for it.

Knowledge and ignorance about this technology; need for education: If there is one thing that is a key to all the topics discussed, it is this; and it needs to be understood in greater context.

Knowledge is power, it is liberating. It is that which differentiates us from apes. Like someone mentioned on the show, I completely agree about the need to educate new users of this technology. Back when I was in college, the only thing I learned in a curriculum about it was how to program. That is so prehistoric in today’s conditions.

These days kids are exposed to computers even before they learn the right way to form a sentence. So, part of computer education in schools needs to include an awareness course—this is so vital to future cyber-behaviour. It could change the way kids behave, even in anonymity¹.

For those of us already on the wrong side of the school fence, and wanting to use computer and the internet, I’d advice a a short course on internet awareness—if available in the neighbourhood, or spend some time to understand the medium. Try the internet itself for awareness—it’s not hard, there’s tons of good stuff. This is crucial to everything you do online.

Government laxity in capacity and in laws, freedom of expression: I think Governments react mostly in a ‘reactive’ mode (for lack of a better word). How do we control this, how do we control that. For starters, let’s drop “control”. Instead of control, let’s try democracy.

Let’s talk about this case—Mahatma Gandhi’s idiotic portrayal as a pole-dancer on Youtube. It offends me, but I also know that no amount of mudslinging is going to erase even an ounce of this great man’s dignity. Instead I would pity the creator’s ignorance, and his lack of respect to someone as great as Mahatma Gandhi, and move on.

Access to pornography and parent’s concerns: Some of these concerns also relate to knowledge, awareness and sex education. Parents and teachers can help children propagate this idea in an educational manner—so as not to be ashamed of—and that it is an integral part of human behavior. A subjective and rational approach to making kids aware helps them be themselves and not feel ashamed about, or acknowledge it.

Cyber-stalking, account cracking, stealing privacy, pedophilia: Most of these are really crimes, and they need to be dealt with using the help of authorities and security agencies. In the same breath, there is a dire need for cybersquads in Police forces around the country. We need some specific cyber laws for these. I really hope we get to see some.

Cyberbullying can simply be ignored by simply developing a thick skin. If you’re particularly hurt by mudslinging—anonymous or otherwise, choose to react to it on your blog or on a platform with a thoughtful response. People usually see the full picture and if you’re right, more people would be with you, than with a prankster. Usually most pranks would die that instant and they stop bothering you.

Cyber-dating: While cyber-dating is really a sweeter and lighter side of it all, there are possible dangers there too—like in impersonation, lies, etc. Approach it if you’re comfortable, or even desperate enough to find your better half. Use common sense and your sense of being human; do not just follow the machine. You can usually sniff someone out easier online than meeting in real life, if you have a nose for such things.

But there are people who like online stuff more than the offline ones—like that particular lady on the show who said she found her partner more interesting on the net than when she had met him in real.

Honestly, I believe in the net as a great medium for knowledge, business and everything largely good. Bracketing and shutting things down is like throwing baby out along with the bath water. I hope better sense prevails everywhere and wherever people are in a dilemma on these above issues.

1. I’d like to believe, to a large extent.

As I get introduced to each function, I can already think of ways in which I can use its capability in the code I would write. I never thought like that about any other programming language, I have learnt. I swear! And, I am still learning procedural programming, and have yet to touch upon object-oriented methodology.

How I wish, I had discovered this in the early nineties, while I was in college, and was more enthusiastic about such things. How I wish Civil engineering departments in institutions around the world finally put the age-old prescription of FORTRAN to rest, and replace it instead with Python.

Digression: The reason I really took to programming was to reduce repetitive term-work, and not because it was part of my course. My first major coding started when a professor, teaching Water Resources Engineering in my under-graduate course (circa 1991), gave us a pile of gravity-dam stability problems, which we were to submit as our term-work.

It was near the end of term and we were really deep in our year long portion to cover¹. The-term work would take out my precious time from my other studies.

I solved one problem manually, which made me realize the enormous amount of work we were given. The time constraint was squeezing out every minute of what was left before our exams.

Fortunately, the set of problems were similar and I had just about three cases that were slight variants of each other. So, I wrote my first program that actually solved my problem. Then, I validated it with the work I had done by-hand previously. The results matched.

But, I didn’t want to cheat, so I told my professor that because of time constraints, I had written a program that could calculate it for me, instead of solving all of the given problems by-hand.

I was expecting him to ask me to do according to the practice and as per term-work criteria for students. That is solve and report in our journals by-hand. No one had ever submitted a computer output as a term-work before. So, I wasn’t even expecting anything else.

But, my professor’s reaction surprised me. He asked for the results from my hand-calculations and then checked the computer output. And because he didn’t much understand my program, he asked me to print intermediate results from the program to further validate and cross-check the program’s ability. I did that and they matched too (obviously).

To my joy, he was impressed and went on to allow me to submit the computer outputs, and asked me to include the program source and validation report in my journal. I was only too happy to oblige.

As I learn Python, it surely brings some of that enthusiasm back.

1. We had no semester system, so we actually started studying towards the year end.

Being a digital fan/nut, my logos have always had that “digital” edge, instead of absolute curves, like the original Superman logo. The mid-section of my S was a pair of straight parallel horizontal lines curving only at the corners touching the diamond. And so was the last curl at the bottom.

After I got engaged, that “S” ended-up meaning something else. Like the first letter of my wife’s name :).

Shekhar, thanks for spending time with us, we enjoyed your company.

An anonymous reader writes “The Christian Science Monitor is running a story on a recent University of Munich study of school children in 31 countries that found a correlation between frequent computer usage and poor academic performance. Having more than one computer in the home was found to be particularly bad news! For those Slashdotters with children, how do you deal with your kids’ computer use?” (via Slashdot)

The very idea has been dogging Sneha and I for sometime. In our case, it is how much of use rather than how many. As parents, we feel that our children should learn the basics in the conventional way during the initial phases of learning.

For example, our older child, loves coloring, and we’re happy that she’s really good at it not only in neatness, but also in choosing colors intelligently that compliment or represent certain objects. When I showed her how to color on a computer, it got her very excited. At the same time, her interest to color by conventional means (using a color pencil) dropped significantly. It was then that we realized that, especially for young ones, how much harm a continued computer use could bring-in. They do not understand the learning process. To them, it’s just an easier way to do. Period. It was only when we explained to her that, she should first learn and do using paper and pencil, she seemed to understand.

This thought brings forth two important conclusions as we perceive (atleast applicable to young ones’ use of computers):

• Computer learning should aid learning, like being one of the resource center for information look-up as well as complement by visualization. Computers tend to lose the pupils’ focus on the subject due to its mundane operations (and, in my opinion, this is not just limited to young ones alone).
• Persistent use of computers, among the very young ones, may kill their inherent thinking capacity and personal-skill appreciation.

At the moment, computer use is restricted to our eldest daughter (4 years old) and time is rationed to about 1-2 hours per week. I wonder if other parents have experienced anything similar or made any contrasting observations.

Aaryana’s hand works furiously with crayons. Sneha and I were pleasantly surprised to know from her teacher that she has a better color-sense than the rest of the lot in her class. This one’s with Sneha’s help drawing outlines and labelling the maps.

But you ask my kiddo pointing at any map (not just from the drawing), I’ll bet 90/1 that she knows the name of the country and its capital.